About

Re: place is an art research project initiated by Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHIB) in association with Oslo Academy of Art (KHIO) and The Grieg Academy (Griegakademiet). The core research team consists of Jeremy Welsh, professor & dean of Fine Art at KHIB; Synne Bull, associate professor in film and video at KHIO and Morten Eide Pedersen, leader of the composition department at Griegakademiet, Trond Lossius, engaged by KHIB as project leader and Signe Lidén, as research assistant from October 2012.  Colleagues from all three institutions will be involved in the project, as well as external partners and guest researchers.

The project is an investigation of (relationships between) place, time and memory as manifested in artistic works exploring image, sound, text – or combinations of these. It builds upon the existing practices of participating artists and further extends investigations that have taken place within the framework of previous research projects and seminars, including, most recently, the seminar "Placeholders", which took place at KHiB in September 2011.

The question of "Place" is considered both in terms of how artistic practices encounter and interact with actual places and, conversely, how creative acts can also take the form of "placemaking". Artists connected to the project represent both of these positions, and in many instances combine aspects of both in their investigations of the complex relationships between image (representation) and memory as lived experience of a specific space or place.The artistic strategies employed range from the interpretive, for example how a contemporary composer might formulate a new soundtrack for a film such as "Berlin, A City Symphony", through the investigative such as photographic explorations of particular places, to the constitutive, for example how contemporary media are used to elaborate a "sense of place" that can be virtual, distributed and post-geographic.

How "place" is constituted, reconfigured, deconstructed, augmented, discussed, described, experienced – through a variety of signifying practices – is the core theme and question of the project.There are a number of different approaches that will be used, examined, cross-referenced and interrogated during the project period.The intention is not to realize one single, unified artistic project, but to gather together a number of related and interconnected artistic processes through a series of thematically linked events that are also connected to discursive investigations of the project’s theme or themes.

All project participants will have the possibility to make posts to this blog, which will be used to track the development of individual elements throughout the project period, 2012 - 2013.